My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [95]
Although Mary and I instantly recaptured our special chemistry, I could tell a couple days into the two weeks we set aside for rehearsal that we might have picked the wrong material. The director didn’t give us much to work with, and I had problems with the coarse language. It never felt right calling Mary a bitch even though we were acting. We did a lot of takes and in the end it wasn’t there, not the way I’d hoped.
Others disagreed. The play aired in May 2003 to mixed reviews, though it got a rave from actress Anne Bancroft. I bumped into her and her husband, Mel Brooks, one night at a restaurant shortly after the play aired and Anne was full of compliments and even a little envy.
“Why didn’t you ask me to do it?” she said.
My jaw dropped.
“If you’re telling the truth, I’m going to kill myself,” I said.
As much as I enjoyed working again with Mary, I also would have loved to have worked with Anne.
Afterward, instead of rushing into more jobs, I tried behaving like an actual retiree for a change. An early riser, I worked out at the local gym, brought coffee to Michelle, and then disappeared for much of the rest of the day into the guesthouse, where I had a sophisticated computer setup to indulge my passion in computer animation and CGI. Few people realized it, but I had been the computer graphics specialist on Diagnosis Murder.
In my so-called retirement, I made short films, including some in 3D. I was like a mad scientist in his lab. I put my present-day self in an old Dick Van Dyke Show episode, and I cut and pasted myself into famous movies, which I then showed to my kids and grandkids, though their amusement hardly matched mine. I felt as if I had entered my second or third … make that my fifth or sixth childhood.
28
CURTAIN CALLS
It was Carl’s idea to do one more show. For years, we had resisted the idea of a Dick Van Dyke Show reunion. Although we understood the desire fans and network executives had to see all of us back together, it never appealed to most of us. Those things generally don’t strike the right note with actors. Sure, fans get to take a nice, well-produced walk down memory lane and remember everything they loved about a show. They also get to see how everyone looks years later. But the actors don’t want to be reminded of what they have lost or who looks more pickled than preserved.
We were a different bunch, too. We knew The Dick Van Dyke Show was really all about Carl Reiner. The show had started with him writing a full season of scripts and it had succeeded because of his genius as a writer. You can compare those shows with any great work of literature. It started and ended with the writing, and all of us knew it. That’s why it ended after five special years. Carl wanted to move on. He was done with those characters. Like any ambitious writer, he had more he wanted to explore. And all of us knew that our roles in the show started and ended with his desire to continue breathing life into the characters he had created for us. We knew great TV began with great writing, not great acting, and that is a distinction that can’t ever be ignored or underestimated. TV just won’t work any other way. It all starts on the page.
And so when Carl stood onstage at the 2003 TV Land Awards and accepted that network’s “Legend Award” by expressing his desire to do one more episode with the original cast, we paid attention. All of us heard about it immediately. Those who were not there in person received phone calls. Since reporters began contacting me almost as soon as he walked offstage, I got more details from Carl, who explained that he was going to write one more episode, the 159th as it were, bringing the characters up to date. He said he had an idea, and he sounded excited.